English Department Newsletter, 19 September 2005

Tech/Ped Corner

I recently read about an amusing meme (a viral idea) circulating on the web. The Ministry of Reshelving is dedicated to ?fixing? shelving errors at local bookstores. From the website (http://avantgame.blogspot.com/2005/08/ministry-of-reshelving.html):

3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell's 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as "Fiction" or "Literature."

4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as "Current Events", "Politics", "History", "True Crime", or "New Non-Fiction."

While the idea of moving books around is pretty cool in itself, the authors made the project much more intriguing by documenting their activities online and inviting others to participate. Today I'll discuss a couple resources that allow you to do facilitate similar collaborative activity among your students.

Flickr. Flickr is an online photo-sharing site. While its free account isn't unlimited, the initial terms are very generous. You and your students can use flickr's nifty indexing and group functions to produce collaborative projects without any coding skills or spending any money.

For example, you can have students create ?memory maps,? in which they use flickr's photo-annotation tools to add text to images of places. They can then link these photos to other photos using the ?groups? option. Check out the Flickr memory maps group: http://flickr.com/groups/memorymaps/
Blogger. As you probably know, blogs are an easy way to leap into the fray of online writing and publishing. In particular, they allow users to post pretty quickly, and to link to one another easily. You might want to use blogger's free accounts to have your students produce public writing, responses, and discussion.

You may also choose to have your students collaborate on a blog. One of blogger's more interesting features is its ?invitation? system, which allows you to invite multiple authors to collaborate on a single blog. Check out http://www.blogger.com/ for more about this feature.
Del.icio.us. Delicious, a social bookmarking tool, allows users to share links with others. While this service will probably function in an auxiliary mode for your class, it can still be a great way for students to share and pool resources in any genre. For example, some of the folks here at Columbia interested in ?css? (a web-design standard) use the tag ?cssroundtable? to create a set of links about this design system. Check it out at http://del.icio.us/

I hope these resources help you and your students make the most of what the web has to offer. If you have other suggestions or questions, please drop me a line.

See you next month!
Brendan

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Faculty News
ARIELLE GREENBERG BYWATER: Arielle?s second full-length poetry collection, MY KAFKA CENTURY, will be out from Action Books in October. Arielle will be going on a small book tour to support her book this fall at Emory University, University of Georgia, and University of Alabama as well as at the Burning Chair series in New York City. In addition to her new collection, Arielle also has the honor of having her poem, ?Turn of the Screw,? featured in the BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2005, out now and edited by Paul Muldoon.
PETER CHIRSTENSEN: Peter was the co-editor of the text and the dramaturg for a staged reading of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts I and II, which were presented by the Shakespeare Project of Chicago on September 17. The director (and co-editor) was Charley Sherman, and the cast consisted of Equity actors. The two performances were at the Newberry Library and at the Wilmette Public Library. Peter presented a brief historical background to the plays before each performance.
GARNETT KILBERG COHEN: Garnett recently signed a contract with McGraw Hill for a textbook/anthology on the short story. Entitled, THE SHORT STORY, FORM & CONTENT, the book will be approximately 1700 pages, and will cover stories form Chekhov to present day, with an emphasis on contemporary stories, and a focus on the evolution of form and the blurring of lines between forms. She gave a reading and an interview to PROSODY, WYEP Radio (an NPR host station), last week. The 30 minute program will air in October. Also, she we interviewed by ATENCION in San Miguel Allende this past summer. They also reprinted a piece of her flash fiction.
SARAH ODISHOO: Sarah?s short story, ?Child?s Play,? has been accepted for publication by the LOUISVILLE REIVEW. ?The Trial,? another short story, has been accepted by FIRST INTENSITY, Vol. 21. Her poem, ?The Flowering,? has also been accepted for publication by THE CHRYSALIS READER.
KAREN OSBORNE: The Oak Park Film Festival featured the film, ?A Common Flower,? by Doreen Bartoni. This film was derived from Karen?s short story, ?Getting What You Came For.? In addition to the film, Karen?s short story has also been adapted for the stage by Dan Scroggins. Karen also participated in film festival as a featured speaker on the panel, ?Gender and Sexual Orientation in Cinema.?
TONY TRIGILIO: Tony published the poems ?Face on Mars,? ?Corrosive,? and ?My Vertigo? in THREE CANDLES (http://www.threecandles.org). He was also one of the featured readers at the Around the Coyote Arts Festival on September 10.
DAVID TRINIDAD: A poem from David?s first book, PAVANE, entitled ?The Boy,? was translated into French and published in WALT WHITMAN HOM(M)AGE 2005/1855, published by Turtle Point Press and editions joca seria. The anthology honors the 150th anniversary of the original publication of LEAVES OF GRASS.

David was also one of twelve poets interviewed for OUTSIDE THE LINES: TALKING WITH CONTEMPORARY GAY POETS, edited by Christopher Hennessy and published by the University of Michigan Press. It is the first book of it kind. Other poets interviewed for the book included Frank Bidart, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, and D.A. Powell.

This summer David?s poems appeared in GARGOYLE, INDIANA REVIEW, MANGROVE, and the online publications COCONUT and THREE CANDLES.

A review of David?s last book, PHOEBE 2002, also appeared in the INDIANA REVIEW.
STAN WEST: Stan West has recently hosted the Oak Park Film Festival, and two of his films were shown, and one of these films, ?Mutilated Rest,? features GEORGE BAILEY.

Department newsletter compiled by M. Killian McCurrie.